Intellisense in MDX Studio

With Visual Studio and other modern IDEs, Intellisense became a must have tool in the developer’s toolset, boosting productivity. MDX developers have asked for it, but full, context-dependant intellisense wasn’t available. Until now. MDX Studio now features comprehensive support for intellisense. The first version with usable intellisense support is 0.4.4. (As usual, please visit MDX Studio forum to leave feedback and to find out about new releases).

The following screenshots show some (but certainly not all!) of the MDX Studio intellisense capabilities:

User starts typing new MDX statement

It picks the “SELECT” keyword from the first two letters “se”. User can either keep typing, or hit Space or Enter to do auto-complete this keyword.

The auto-completion is aware of the cube metadata when MDX Studio is connected to the server. So when user typed “D”, the auto-completion list featured MDX functions starting with “D”, MDX keywords starting with “D” but also appropriate metadata objects, in this case – dimensions, starting with “D”.

Once “Descendants” function is chosen, the tooltip shows what arguments it takes

The auto-completion list is context-aware, since [Date] is dimension name, it now offers all of the hierarchies of the Date dimension.

The auto-completion is also aware of MDX type system. Now it understands that [Date].[Calendar] is hierarchy, therefore it offers MDX methods and properties which can be applied to the hierarchy, as well as levels of this hierarchy.

Intellisense is also location-aware. In this case, the user just typed the “FROM” keyword, so auto-completion list offers list of cubes in the current database which can be used in the FROM clause.

There are more features in MDX Studio Intellisense, like parenthesis matching etc. Hopefully this will make MDX developers more productive.